[trevius]

I PM'd Cavedude directly and this is what he had to say about it:

Under Linux, creating a symlink from the world quest folder to the daughter zone directory works perfectly. However, I doubt this will work under Windows (though, give it a try.) Under Linux, a symlink is a true shortcut to the folder/directory and is treated the same as if it were the normal data. Windows, however will often treat the shortcut for what it is, nothing more than a file with the destination folder/file info contained within. This is especially true over a network and will often cause situations like this to fail. I am pretty certain EQEmu looks for the quests folder in a sub directory of the main binary directory, so specifying a path in eqemu_config.xml will likely fail. So, the only thing you are left with is to have a separate quest folder. That isn't so bad, however as that's one less thing zone will need to communicate to the world server for. The more self reliant it is, the better off it is.

As for the zones taking over new ports when they crash... That's a problem with EQEmu and it bothers the hell out of me. When a static zone crashes or is shut down it becomes dynamic, including taking over a port reserved for dynamic zones when it comes back up. It also has the inherent problem of clearing spawn timers, so nameds pop back up and player corpses don't depop/move to GY/SR. I've asked a few times to get this behavior changed so static zones will reboot as static zones, eliminating all of these problems but it looks like a major overhaul of the system would be required. In my case, I have two machines on different networks so my ports can overlap. If you're on the same network, that's not an option obviously (unless you want to get into port/IP forwarding/spoofing, which can get messy and pretty much requires Linux). My only suggestion is to prevent static zones from rebooting automatically in variables (hopefully that still works). You'll then lose a static zone of course, however the zone that crashed should open on the dynamic server the next time a player tries to enter it, making it accessible. You'll just need to keep an eye out on how many zones you have available since they won't auto-boot after a crash. You may want to give yourself extra dynamics since it's very uncommon to crash a dynamic instance to the point where it won't re-open (though, I have seen that on TGC, sadly)

I hope this helps, and if you have anymore questions, feel free to ask.

IMO there has to be another way to do this, so I might try contacting some of the other server admins that I am pretty sure use multiple zone servers. I think KMRA uses a few and probably TZ/VZ too. Maybe TheLieka can help. I might try bugging him about it tomorrow :P